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Pinboard Profile picture
@Pinboard
Oct 10, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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This is pretty great. The undercover FBI agent you're trying to sell nuclear secrets to has asked you to leave a memory card in a specific location, but you're no fool. So to avoid getting caught, you bring your wife to stand next to you and keep a lookout while you crime.
The summary of the email exchanges is pretty great:

FBI: plz put the crime data in a location we picked
Criminal: lol no way. I'll upload it.
FBI: no we need it on a card.
Criminal: OK but I'll pick the place. Also I've never crimed before
FBI: No plz use our place.
Criminal: OK
I guess this guy's long drives *with his wife* to deliver classified information to a location an internet stranger told him to use gave this guy a lot of time to overthink how to safely communicate with that amazingly helpful stranger in the future. There is a parable here.
After the FBI had given him $30,000 to fully incriminate himself (and his wife! I can't get over that part!), the guy went on to explain in detail that he'd need to ask for more money in the future to make sure it wasn't all a setup.
To summarize again:

Criminal: I want $100K for this data, which I will encrypt and upload because it's 2021. The high price guarantees you're not the Feds.

FBI: We need you to put it in a tree stump in Surveillance Park, and we only have $30K.

Criminal: OK. I'll bring my wife.
The criminal complains to the FBI that the most recent time they asked him to bring incriminating documents, there was only one place to park and a huge observation tower. At this point you have to assume there was an FBI betting pool in full swing.
The full text of the thing is worth reading: justice.gov/opa/press-rele…. I like how the "[sic]" here is the FBI's final dagger into this guy's lonely heart.
TL;DR of the Toebbe espionage case
I want to read the part of the complaint where TOEBBE is convinced by his FBI handler that he should use half a peanut butter sandwich to hide the SD card because a whole sandwich is "too risky".

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More from @Pinboard

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Jul 16
Lurking the r/generator subreddit recently I learned something interesting about the situation in Texas. Quite reasonably a lot of people in the Houston area have decided to get generators installed, since there have been recent major power outages both in summer and winter...
This being Texas, what most people want to run off their generator is a five-ton whole-house air conditioner. This as you can imagine is pretty power hungry, particularly when it first powers on. To avoid storing gas/diesel, a lot of people have opted for a natural gas hookup
Natural gas distribution in Texas is not set up to support hundreds of multi-kilowatt generators running at the same time, let alone firing up at the same time. So what people have collaboratively built in Texas is a system for converting power outages into massive gas outages.
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Jul 9
The first time I voted in a US election I was amazed that no proof of citizenship—not even photo ID—was required. From the point of view of an immigrant, you're constantly made to prove your legal residency for stuff—jobs, school, driving—but for some reason not voting.
I don't really get why positive proof of ID isn't a voting requirement, other than the fact that voting law in the US is very old and predates the modern surveillance state. I don't have strong feelings about it, but it's definitely a US oddity, like the lack of national ID
From the point of view of public faith in elections, there does seem to be something rickety about the combination of trust-me voter registration requirements, absentee ballots, and mail-in votes getting counted for weeks after election day.
Read 5 tweets
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Jan 5
Cryptocurrency and generative AI make roughly the same size claims to being transformative innovations, so it's interesting to see how many interesting things people have already found to do with the latter, while the first has mostly been an expensive tour through human folly
I like thinking of cryptocurrency as "financial string theory", but for the parallel to really work a lot more physicists would need to be in jail
With both crypto and string theory, you have domain experts in thrall to a mathematical apparatus so intellectually satisfying that they get emotionally invested into bringing it into contact with reality. But instead each failed attempt pushes them further out into la-la-land
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Dec 21, 2023
Rising from the crypt to talk a little about how pre-wikipedia generations lived. There was a big encyclopedia in the library, but only really rich families would own one. The best that poor kids could hope for was grocery store encyclopedias, bought one volume at a time
Grocery chains really would sell the world's saddest encyclopedia, one slim volume a week, and you felt lucky to have it. Unrestricted access to a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica is the thing that felt most like having access to the world wide web in the pre-www days.
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Aug 28, 2023
Early this year I went online after taking too many drugs and ordered a Mongolian yurt. Here is my yurt, and here is my story: Image
The great thing about yurts is you can get high, make a deposit, and forget you bought one for seven months. Then in late July I got email giving me an imminent delivery date and demanding to see a photo of the finished substructure. I tried to bluff them with a quick Lowe's run Image
The yurt company was totally on to me, though. Everyone lies about the substructure. Demands for photo evidence grew insistent, and I found myself having to level heavy things in the desert while getting heatstroke


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Jul 28, 2023
This whole thread on large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is great, but the real showstopper is that global-warming induced breakdown in this flow will result in significant *cooling* for a large chunk of Eurasia, greatly complicating the politics of climate response.
The existing strategy for mitigating climate change is incoherent because:

1. It demands a total restructuring of societies worldwide
2. Most of this burden would fall on developing nations
3. It ignores imminent tipping points that (by definition) there is no coming back from
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